Saturday, February 5, 2011

I've Got to See a Show

I've got to see a show. I'm salivating. I want to see Will. He's doing a show soon that's not your cheeriest night at the theatre, but it would be worth it to watch him. I've seen him "get it": illuminate his character so the audience knows what the playwright meant when she wrote it, which is the actor's only job.

When I worked with him in the theatre, I felt about him more than with anyone else that he was my peer, almost my sibling. We had a fight one time backstage that was so bad it ended with him shouting profanity and me running, weeping histrionically, to my dressing room. It took me a whole year longer than him to apologize, and to even know that I should, which maybe shows who between the two of us was the bigger diva. We always were like oil and water.

One of my favorite memories of him is a tea scene with high-running tension and never-ending scoops of sugar. I feel like I remember the sound of our tea cups rattling from barely contained laughter, and there were definitely bite marks inside my cheeks - the best way I've found to stay in character in that kind of situation.

There was a suicide scene I watched him enact, and it was only a staged reading, for heaven's sake, but I couldn't get out of my chair afterward. The way he had "cut" himself over and over, resolutely willing himself to no longer exist, was an unexpectedly perfect picture of my own interior pain. I couldn't stop weeping, even as people filed past me uncomfortably. That's why I can't make the theatre my church. It can bring up the deep things, but there's nowhere to go with them. In the church you know the only place to take it all is the cross.

One time Will, his wife, and I drove up to Chattanooga for an audition and all shared a hotel room. We sat up til after midnight talking about God. We don't share the same mindset on that subject, but I think he might come closer to my way of thinking before all is said and done. I love him, so maybe he'll forgive the presumption.